Utopia - John Pilger [DVD]

Excellent

Great film - watch it!

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There are some excellent and impassioned reviews here, which give very good overviews of this very important DVD, and for what it is worth, I wanted to add my thoughts in this brief summation. It is fact that Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, its mineral wealth the envy of many a nation. What is not so widely known is the horrendous treatment of the Australia's indigenous peoples through the almost `codified manner' by which successive governments, of that country, have tried to destroy the indigenous people their culture and their way of life.

​This is not the first time John Pilger has raised the horrific nature of what amounts to a managed genocide of a people. He has reported on this tragedy since the early 1980s. While certain policies and practices may not be as overt as those applied in the early 1960s, none the less the process continues. The 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of indigenous peoples is one such example. There is a very clear lack of interest of why indigenous peoples routinely die in police custody. Why they are over represented in the prison population in the first place? However, what really left me cold was the way people in general behaved when Pilger asked white Australian's on "Australia Day" for their comments on the plight of the indigenous peoples - in one a family hurriedly walks away in huff, while an elderly lady makes the following observation;

"That's what they (the Aboriginal people) want... that's how they like to live"

Therefore, is it surprising that Australia has the distinction of being the only developed country, whose government, has been condemned as racist by the United Nations. The Aboriginal people have chronic ill health in their communities; they have horrible living conditions and they are left to eke out an existence as destitute peoples in their own Country.

The following aspects, while not necessarily covered in Pilger's should also be considered, Australia's First Peoples were relegated onto reservations and missions, circumscribed entry into white towns, subjugated as unpaid slave labour, their native languages and sacrosanct rituals prohibited, and mixed blood children `The Stolen Generations' were forcibly abducted from their parents for re-socialisation - i.e. to be made "white". Until the 1967 plebiscite in Australia, Aborigines were government possessions: "The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one's own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have."

The current Australian Constitution:

1. There is no mention of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution.

2. Section 25 contemplates laws that ban people from voting because of their race. This power was last used to exclude Aboriginal people from voting in Queensland, up until 1965.

3. Section 51(xxvi) is a `races power’, which allows `special laws' to be directed at the people of a particular race.

4. While this power allows laws to address disadvantage, it leaves open the possibility that future governments could unfairly target the people of any race for negative treatment.

For some detractors "of an uncertain warped temperament”, this maybe a more wilted experience at best and their need to troll will be awakened again!

----------------UPDATE------------------------------------------24th May 2014

One reviewer has called this DVD documentary 'Very one-sided and over-simplified'. I say watch the DVD and make up your own mind. There are always apologists and deniers - and they do reviews too.

---------------UPDATE-------------------------------------------21 June 2014

The July edition of History Today has article on the 'genocide of the native peoples of Tasmania'

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Australia has always had a sunny image and a positive,extrovert quality of benevolence,however something has been missing in its presentation of itself in its history and even politics.It has sent forth its sons and daughters to England and USA like Clive James,Germaine Greer,Robert Hughes and John Pilger.Pilger has been a polemical journalist and documenter of great conviction.Like Greer he has denounced Australia's treatment of its indigenous countrymen,sweeping its problems under the carpet to promote a 'city of white'(Canberra),built on colonial attitudes.There was no mention of Aborigines,the first Australians. Pilger has been here before 28 years before, seeing no changes,and even in 1966 in Jay Creek when he covered the `stolen generation' linked to fascist eugenics, 'breeding out the black',many to become domestic servants in middleclass homes,a form of slavery.

Pilger's tone is one of controlled anger,yet he tries to argue the case with calm reasonableness.He makes a searing indictment of the `apartheid' and `genocide' the early colonial settlers and future generations came to practice,the utopian fantasy of white Australia and the dystopia on which it is built.He visits Botany Bay,once home to the Aborigines,now a hotel that charges $30,000 a week to stay there.He visits spa hotels that once served as concentration camps, pausing en route to harangue sheepish- looking politicians and asking random revellers if they understand why their predecessors don't celebrate Australia Day.They blame the Aborigines for the conditions they live in as if they want to live like that,their drunkenness,their self-neglect.They are denied basic rights,classed as uncivilized,their humanity denigrated (cf.'the history wars'of the 1990s).The underlying problems are their need for good housing, education, healthcare,and employment..They are denied the basic facilities white Australians take for granted.Some live in asbestos-riddled houses,tin shacks.

White Australia has emerged as one of the richest nations on the planet thanks to its mineral resources, the indigenous people are worse off than many of those living in developing countries.The incidence of trachoma among indigenous Australians is among the highest in the world.A landgrab of Northern Australian land was practised on the pretext of accusations of paedophile rings in Mutitjulu(all unproven by reports saying there's no evidence). The 2007 "intervention" in the Northern Territory organised by the John Howard government was a bizarre act of taxpayer-funded official hysteria.This led to federal takeover and army occupation to `save children'.This was backed up by government chicanery,the `Lateline'TV propaganda,cover-ups,lies, stopping the benefits of those who refused,denied basic amenities,demonised,and native title legislation was ignored.All Aborigines were blackened as molesters.A lot of the children removed to residential schools were sexually abused by whites.Some of the richest mining land has been situated under Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal territories.

The film concentrates on Aboriginal communities: Utopia,in central Australia;Ampilatwatja in the Northern Territory;and the Mutitjulu community at the eastern end of Uluru(Ayers Rock).Utopia is the home of the 1st Australians,a very poor ,dry, dusty,most disadvantaged place.In Ampilatwatja,there is no basic sanitation,shelter or transport.There is chronic diabetes,coronary disease and trachoma.The children suffer deafness due to dehydration and cockroaches.These are inhuman 3rd world conditions in one of the world's richest countries.50,000 Aborigines need more help from the government.Most Aborigines die by age 45.The mining industry has campaigned against taxes on their profits.Their taxes have been reduced to near nothing,losing $60million, enough to reduce the terrible lack of rights and poverty of the Aborigines.Whenever Aborigines' expectations have been raised,that trust has been betrayed by treachery.In west Australia x8 more Aborigines have been imprisoned than blacks in apartheid South Africa.A 14th prison was built in a policy of `packing and stacking'We see videos of Aboriginals in custody who ended up dead.Pilger interviews Arthur and Leila Murray(now deceased)who campaigned for son Eddy for 30 years,who was killed in custody.Pilger tells it like it is,presenting shocking facts,and images of incarceration, disease,malnutrition and neglect.Racism persists beneath Australian society,despite apologies given in 2008 by PM Rudd,and now given doublespeak under questioning.

There is a basic difference between white Judeo-Christian belief systems of `progress' ,where ideas of 'heaven' mean you can do to the land what you like, plunder, pillage,rape,destroy;and indigenous beliefs focused on, for example, the ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation. Instead, we are all currently contemplating the consequences of climate change and industrial processes that threaten the life supports of this planet. The traditional societies of the aboriginal people's has been destroyed violently by europeans who do see or understand that indigenous people's remind us all of different ways of orientating human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. The path we have taken is not the only path. The Aboriginals remind us that we must all change the way we inhabit this planet. It is this unpalatable truth that has caused so much antipathy towards a people who's country, way of life and way of thinking has been stolen from them! Pilger does a sterling job to present the unbroken history of Aboriginal presence and resistance as well as state maltreatment,from imprisonment through the Stolen Generations to the current situation.Pilger usefully employs Aboriginal speakers like Randall,Nold,Tjanara Goreng Goreng,Patricia Morton-Thomas,Arthur Murray,Rosalie Kunoth-Monks and journalist Amy McQuire,determined to bring justice back to their land.